Ohio’s superintendent of instruction has once again painted a bleak picture for the State Board of Education if funding falls short in the next state operating budget.
Superintendent Paul Craft explained the budget’s impact at a monthly board meeting on Monday, as well as the work he and his team have done to engage lawmakers as the budget process moves forward.
“We are trying to be visible and meet with as many members as we can,” Craft informed the crowd.
The board’s power has been reduced since the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce was established in 2023 as part of an overhaul of the state’s education system. The board’s primary focuses are now educator licensing, district territory disputes, and teacher disciplinary issues.
With the change in power distribution, the board’s main revenue source became teacher license fees, which ebb and flow from year to year, typically boosting the coffers at the start of the year and then fading as the year progresses.
Craft and the board do not intend to raise the teacher license fee unless absolutely necessary, in part because they do not want potential teachers to be discouraged from entering the workforce and applying for licenses.
“The pipeline is tight right now, and we have districts with dozens of unfilled teaching positions because they can’t find candidates,” Craft told the Ohio House Education Committee at a recent budget hearing. “We want to hold off on fee increases as long as we can, only because I don’t see this pipeline suddenly becoming flush again, absent something really changing.”
Craft approached the state in August, requesting emergency funding to avoid having to raise teacher licensure fees that year, as well as to cover a $3 million deficit. This request came after Craft gave the board a bleak outlook for their funding in 2024.
The Ohio Controlling Board approved the $4.66 million emergency funding request, which Craft said would help the board get through the fiscal year but did not end “tough times” for the agency.
Without help from the state operating budget this year, the administration will be forced to consider another year of cuts, this time to staff, which could be crippling.
According to an agency analysis conducted by the Legislative Budget Office of the state’s Legislative Service Commission, the board has 58 full-time positions to cover administration and the board’s roles, which include issuing approximately 140,000 educator credentials per year.
Craft said the agency has gone down to 56 employees in the last year, and he said his team has been slow to begin the process of hiring to full capacity because they want to ensure the board will make it through the fiscal year.
“(Without the budget funding) We would have to go down from 56 … to about 26 folks to experience those savings through personnel cuts,” Craft told the board’s members. “I don’t know of any way we would fulfill the mission that we have at that level.”
Craft compared his staffing to the State Board of Nursing, which licenses roughly the same number of people as the Board of Education.
“They’re doing it with 79 folks, we’re doing it with 56,” according to him.
Craft, who was hired in December 2023 at a salary of $190,000 per year, told the education committee that one of the reasons he applied for the job in the first place was to assist the agency as they began a “rehab project, we’re rebuilding trust with this organization and the (school) districts of Ohio.”
“There are people in both (legislative) chambers who have said ‘we will never give a dime to the State Board of Education,'” declared Craft.
In fiscal year 2024, the board had $14.8 million in “dedicated purpose” funds, none of which came from the state’s General Revenue Fund. Estimates for fiscal year 2025 showed $15.3 million in dedicated purpose funds, plus $1.35 million in federal funds.
In the new executive budget submitted by Gov. Mike DeWine, he recommended a $2 million increase from the General Revenue Fund each year, as dedicated purpose funds fall to $13 million and $13.5 million in the next two fiscal years, according to the budget office’s breakdown of the governor’s board of education budget proposal.
“The (DeWine) administration included $2 million because they knew we’d need at least that much,” Craft explained at Monday’s board meeting.
With an additional $1.35 million in federal funds planned for the next two fiscal years, the board will receive a total of $33.2 million over the biennium if the governor’s recommendations are included in the Ohio legislature’s final budget draft.
Craft asked the Ohio House committee for additional assistance with expenses, such as the background check system known as the Retained Applicant Fingerprint Database (Rapback), which alerts administration officials if any of the system’s more than 450,000 educators and staff have been “arrested, enters a guilty plea, or is convicted of a criminal offense,” Craft told the committee at a recent meeting.
“We are asking for the direct funding of the Rapback system for all individuals required under (the Ohio Revised Code) to be entered into the system through the SBOE,” said Craft.
To save $1 million, the agency proposes eliminating the Resident Educator Summative Assessment, which he claims can be conducted in individual districts as part of the existing Ohio Teacher Residency Program without the formal assessment.
“After conversations with various stakeholders, including associations, administrators, and individuals with personal experience with the program, it is our belief that districts and schools are best suited to attest to the ability of those teachers in the Ohio Teacher Residency Program,” according to Craft.
Savings from the assessment and state budget increases requested by Craft would “at least keep me from having to cut anymore,” according to Craft, which has resulted in cuts ranging from IT support to delaying the hiring of the two other full-time positions that would bring the board to full staff.
He even mentioned the Department of Government Efficiency, which is run by Elon Musk and is currently attempting to cut funding and budgets across the federal government.
“We were DOGE before it was cool,” Craft explained. “I am convinced that we are currently the most cost-efficient organization in Ohio. We didn’t set out to be that way, but that’s what’s been assigned to us, and it’s a mission that we’ve accepted.”
Budget hearings are currently taking place in the Ohio Statehouse, with a deadline of the end of June to present the governor with a final budget.
